CleverDonkey.com …Musings, Commentary, Opinions, and Drivel

Lawyer?? What's a lawyer, you maggot?!!?

“As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers, faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.” – excerpted from President Obama’s inaugural address

The United States is a country of breathtaking highs and soul-crushing lows.  One of the lowest low points in American history is the tragic reality of the Guantanamo Bay detention area, also known as Gitmo.  For over one hundred years the US Navy has maintained this base on the southern tip of the island of Cuba.  The proximity of the base to the US mainland coupled with its location in a country with whom we have no diplomatic relations has made Gitmo a unique asset for the US government.

The fact that it was not on US soil means that the laws of the United States did not apply.  The fact that it was located in a country where we have no diplomatic relations means we did not have to care about what the host country thought of our activities there.

The Bush administration took advantage of these facts to create a specialized prison to hold what were called “enemy combatants”, which they defined as anybody the President said was involved in terrorism against the United States.  Think about that for a minute – all it took to be sent to Gitmo was the President stating that you were an enemy combatant.  No trial.  No jury.  No lawyers.  No hearings.  No rights.  No Constitution.  No Geneva Convention.  Nothing.  Just imprisonment by Presidential fiat.

Sounds like the old Soviet Union to me, doesn’t it?  Remember those days, when the USSR would throw comrades into prison for political reasons and just make them disappear?  Remember how outraged we were by that?  But with the dawn of the “War on Terror” we ended up with our own American Gulag.  Now, we did not imprison millions at Gitmo, only hundreds, but that doesn’t make it any less wrong.  Picture a serial killer who murders 25 people and compare him to a dictator who causes the genocide of hundreds of thousands.  Do we forgive the serial killer because of the smaller scope of his crime?  Of course not.  The nature of the crime is so heinous that scale doesn’t matter.

And such is the case here.  We, the United States of America, took foreign nationals from foreign soil and imprisoned them with no rights or due process, with no method to appeal their case, without even a sentence to mark the time – just open-ended imprisonment until such time as we decided we wanted to do something with them.

Quite frankly, my opinion is that Bush and Cheney didn’t realize the magnitude of their fuck-up until Gitmo was well-established and publicly known, and then they realized that there was no way to un-fuck it.  Gitmo was filled with a mix of innocent people, people who were not necessarily innocent but for whom there wasn’t enough evidence to try and convict, unquestionably bad people for whom the only evidence was obtained through illegal and/or immoral means (like torture), and the few very bad people who we could legitimately charge and convict of crimes using the standards of any acknowledged court.

So Bush and Cheney looked at their options and realized that the best course of action was to defend the existence of Gitmo, and then leave the mess for the next administration to clean up.  The good news is that even as the administration tried to exercise imperial prerogative, the checks and balances of the American government tried to rein them in.  When the case of a Guantanamo Bay detainee reached the US Supreme Court, the majority ruled in his favor, and their opinion included the following:

“The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”  – Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, affirming that detainees at Guantanamo Bay have rights

And President Obama is acting on that precept and cleaning up the Bush/Cheney debacle.  On his first full day in office he announced that Gitmo would be closed within a year.  There are enormous complications surrounding the clean-up of this mess, such as what to do with people whose home countries won’t take them back?  What do we do with guys we know are our enemies but who we can’t convict with any legitimate evidence?  How do we stop the inevitable stories of abuse and torture from becoming public and further shaming the United States?  The answer is that these questions have no easy answers, but that does not mean that we keep Gitmo open because it is inconvenient to close it.  This is a wrong that needs to be made right, the fact that it will be hard to do doesn’t change that fact.

Obama also announced that, beginning immediately, all further interrogation and treatment of Gitmo detainees would conform to the US Army Field Manual.  So, not only will the American Gulag be closed within a year, but the maltreatment of the prisoners there will stop immediately.

But what about the safety of the United States?  Bush administration defenders love to trot out the “ticking bomb” scenario in attempts to justify torture, by saying that if a hidden bomb is set to explode and a prisoner knows the location of the bomb, we are justified in setting aside any rights of the prisoner and any morality that we hold dear and torture the prisoner in order to save the lives at risk from the bomb.  But a true “ticking bomb” scenario only happens one in a million times – and there were (and are) hundreds and hundreds of Gitmo detainees…were (or are) there hundreds and hundreds of ticking bombs, with their flashing red LED clocks counting down to tragedy, while the foreboding musical ker-thunks from the show “24” serve as a dramatic flourish?

No, there isn’t.  Are there groups who hate the United States and want to strike at us and murder our innocent civilians on American soil?  Yes, there are.  But, to me, the reason that attacking the United States is such a heinous act is because of what we stand for – freedom, justice, morality, opportunity – the pursuit of happiness, if you will.  But if we reject our principles in the defense of our way of life, what will we have gained?  And what will we have lost?

One of the greatest statesmen in American history said it best:

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety” – Benjamin Franklin

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Not-Lean, Not-Mean, Protecting Machine

I was in the mood to watch a movie this weekend, but nothing at any of the nearby theaters was really grabbing at me.  I’d seen the ads for Paul Blart: Mall Cop and chuckled a bit, and I think Kevin James is a naturally funny guy, so I figured I’d give it a shot even though it looked like it might be a throwaway.  I’m glad I did.

This film is almost exactly what you’d expect – Paul Blart is a mall cop, he’s a loveable loser, he takes his job much more seriously than is called for, and when trouble invades the mall he has a chance to redeem himself and become the hero.  Think of it as a comedic homage to Die Hard, set in a New Jersey mall, only the cop (uh, make that security officer)  doesn’t have a gun and the bad guys ride skateboards and bikes.

You see, Paul Blart dreams of joining the New Jersey State Police.  He’s a big guy, but he’s in shape, he’s not dumb, and the only reason he can’t qualify is that his hypoglycemia causes him to fall asleep at random times.  So he takes all of his drive to protect and serve and uses it in his job as a mall cop.

In his home life he’s trying his best to raise a daughter as a single dad, and his daughter and his mother provide moral support for his career and aspirations.  His fellow security guards are mostly just clock punchers who don’t take their work nearly as seriously as Paul.  Then, on Black Friday, a group of thieves take over the mall hoping to make a big score, and Paul gets trapped inside as the only peace officer that can help free the hostages and catch the bad guys.

Let’s just say that action and comedy ensue from there.  There is very little violence, and no cursing, bloodshed, or nudity/sexuality to speak of, other than the surprisingly genuine spark between Paul Blart and kiosk-worker Amy (played by the perky Jayma Mays).  And the good news is that all of the funny bits are not revealed in the trailer.

And that’s the key – Paul Blart: Mall Cop is FUNNY and the story is reasonably engaging for a comedy like this.  When the movie finished, my packed theater erupted into spontaneous applause.  Kevin James embodies his role with a perfect combination of gusto, machismo, earnestness, dopiness, and heroism. 

And, man, can he ride a Segway.

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Before this week I’d never hear of Mike Connell – he’s a Republican IT guru who had recently been subpoenaed to testify in federal court about alleged rigging of the 2004 presidential election.  Mr. Connell was killed this past Friday when his small plane crashed with him at the controls.

Curiously, Mr. Connell had requested protection because he had felt threatened by the powers that be that either didn’t want him to testify and/or who wanted him to take the fall.  It appears that Mr. Connell had decided to “tell-all”, but never got the chance.  More curiously, he had reportedly recently abaonded several other flights due to his concerns that his plane had been tampered with and was unsafe to fly.

And most curious of all is the complete lack of any coverage of this story by the big media outlets.  The only semi-real story about the suspicous details of his death is actually a press release, not a news story.

Now, I do not claim to know what happened – the group issuing the press release could simply be trying to stir the pot, and their may be nothing more to this story than strange timing.  However, given the progression of events it certainly looks and smells suspicious, and certainly worthy of coverage by the MSM, if for no other reason than to mock the “blogosphere” for focusing on such a non-story.

But so far, nothing.  I’ll be interested to see if the Monday news cycle brings more focus onto this story.

Tell your friends.

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Build It By Yourself, We Won't Help

We were doing some Christmas decorating on the outside of the house, and it turned out we needed a couple of things to finish off the process – like one last string of icicle lights, green extension cords, stakes to hold down a big snowman and nutcracker, etc, etc – typical Christmas stuff, in other words.  So we headed out to Lowe Depot, as we like to call it, as our town has a Lowes and a Home Depot across the street from each other, and we typically use them interchangeably and as alternates when we can’t find what we want at one or the other.

Today is Sunday, December 14, 2008 – Christmas is still eleven days away.  We had noticed that both of these stores had started putting out their Christmas merchandise before Halloween, if you can believe that.  Well, today, fully eleven days before Christmas, we were surprised to find – at both stores – that the Christmas merchandise was already being taken down and replaced with regular hardware and gardening stuff.  In both stores the “Christmas Section” was a pathetic little cluster of huddled, leftover crap.

Now, I’m a realist and I understand we were buying this last-minute stuff late in the season, but this wasn’t just slim pickings, this was the store actively taking down the Christmas stuff and getting it out of the way.  When you couple with with the pre-Halloween setup of the Christmas stuff, and we now have a “Christmas Season” that, at least from a retail perspective, runs from before Halloween up until mid-December, then gets shoved out of the way before it can become inconvenient, or something.

It was very dispiriting.  I mean, I know Christmas has a commercial aspect, but this is ridiculous.  Do they really need to be that coldly calculating as to start taking down the Christmas merchandise before Christmas?  I mean, shouldn’t they have healthy sales of the merchandise until at least New Years?  Don’t “The Holidays” equate to Christmas + New Years?  Are they trying to avoid having to sell the stuff at a discount after Christmas?

Sad.

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Look Out, Teeth!

So for that last few weeks I’ve been having a craving for some nice, tasty caramel corn.  Now, when it comes to this confection I’m a purist – I don’t like anything in it but the popcorn and the coating, no nuts, no nothing else.  And that’s really hard to find at a store.  So I finally broke down tonight and made some at home, for the very first time, too.

The recipe is a mash-up of several recipes I found on the tubernets, and it goes like this:

Ingredients
6-7 quarts of air-popped popcorn
1 1/2 sticks of butter
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup light corn syrup
1/2 cup honey
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
Salt to taste

Process
Preheat the oven to 200 degrees.  Make the popcorn in an air popper, then put it into a large roasting pan and put it in the oven while making the coating.

To make the coating, combine the butter, sugar, honey, and corn syrup in a tall pot and heat over medium-high heat until it boils, stirring constantly.  Reduce the heat a little but keep it boiling, and let it boil without stirring it for five more minutes – it’ll get kind of bubbly and frothy.

Remove the syrup from the heat and stir in the vanilla and baking soda.  The baking soda will make it foam up even more, so keep stirring until it settles back down a little bit.  Take the popcorn out of the oven and turn the heat in the oven up to 250 degrees.

Using a ladle or large spoon, drizzle about 1/3 of the syrup over the popcorn, then use a couple of big spoons to stir it up.  Repeat this process 2 more times, adding 1/3 more of the syrup each time, until all the syrup is on the popcorn.  Sprinkle some salt over the popcorn for the final stir, then place in the oven for 75 minutes, taking it out to stir it up every 15 minutes.  When you stir it, make sure to bring up the popcorn/syrup from the bottom and also to break up any large chunks of popcorn.

Remove from the oven and let cool for 15-20 minutes before eating.  You can eat it right out of the oven if you like, but it’ll be kind of sticky and gooey (not to mention hot).  After 20-30 minutes it will be more like what you expect from caramel corn, with individual pieces that mostly don’t stick together.

I will state, unequivocally, that this recipe resulted in the tastiest, most savory caramel corn that I have ever eaten.  Enjoy.

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President Obama

I’m a 47-year-old, white, male, upper-middle-class Texan.  And tonight I am proud to be an American.  We have lived up to the fundamental precept of this country – all men are created equal.  As a country, we make mistakes, we follow ill-advised paths towards unwarranted goals, we stick our heads in the sand about the large issues while simultaneously wailing and gnashing our teeth about unimportant bullshit.  But we also self-correct.  We blink our eyes, shake our head, stand up, look around, assess, re-evaluate, and take action.  So far in our history it’s been two steps forward for each step back, meaning we keep making progress, even if we get off track for short periods.

I don’t love or hate Barack Obama, I don’t love or hate John McCain.  Neither are angels or devils.  Neither would have been my first choice, but neither were horrific.  I don’t know if Barack Obama will be a good president, and I don’t know if he’ll be a bad one.  But I know he’ll be different, and different is what we need.  We needed to break cleanly and clearly, unequivocally, from the last eight years.  We needed to show the world, and ourselves, that we had enough guts and wisdom to admit our mistakes and change course.

And we did.  Barack Obama will be our next president.  A black man.  The fact that I’ve lived to see the first black US president fills me with pride and emotion.  And patriotism.  And optimism.  I hope to live long enough to also see the first woman, the first gay, the first atheist, the first Jew, the first Muslim, and first of every other wrongly oppressed minority get a chance to occupy the Oval Office, as long as they are qualified patriots.

I look forward to seeing the next phase for America under our new president.  I hope, and actually expect, that we will be able to set aside our petty differences, quibbles, and dogma and come together with President Obama to do less of what we’re doing wrong and do more of what we’re doing right…in order to form a more perfect union.

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They say that money can’t buy happiness, and they’re right, but there is a certain amount of joy in finding a product or service that provides you with happiness and utility far beyond the purchase price.  These can be inexpensive doo-dads or expensive gew-gaws, the key to making our list is that the product give us smiles that far exceed the pain of parting with the precious pesos.

Here’s the list:

Oxo Good Grips Magnetic Clips (large and small):  We have dozens of these little guys all over our refrigerator, both the large and small versions.  The big ones work great as chip clips and for larger clipping jobs, and the small ones, which actually have stronger magnets, do great at holding pictures/papers/doodads to the fridge, and also for smaller clipping jobs.

Perfect Tear Chrome Paper Towel Holder:  In my lifetime I’ve bolted at least a dozen crappy paper towel dispensers to various walls and cabinets, and they all sucked.  Either the roll would fall out, or it would be so tight that it wouldn’t rotate causing the towels to tear, or it would be so loose that a quick rip would unspool paper towels like a magician pulling a string of handkerchiefs from his sleeve.  The Perfect Tear solves ALL of these problems, plus it’s cheap and it looks great.  The trick is that the rolling mechanism has a ratchet-like feel to it as you turn the roll, putting just enough pressure to be both a) loose enough to allow for easy dispensing and b) tight enough to allow towels to be torn off with a wrist-flick without the danger of a runaway unspooling disaster.  This is the only paper towel dispenser I will EVER buy.

Dogs: Our dogs, Weagle, Biscuit, and Ruckus (plus our cat, Bouncie).  The amount of joy we get from our pets far, far, FAR exceeds any expenses.

SimpleHuman Dish Rack:  Our little country cottage doesn’t have a dishwasher, so we do dishes the old fashioned way – in the sink, then drying on the rack before (theoretically) putting them away.  This little dish rack works EXACTLY like we need it to, and has taken years of use and abuse in stride.

2000 Ford Expedition:  We have a 2000 Ford Expedition Eddie Bauer 4WD with about 120,000 miles on it, and we LOVE it.  Yes, it’s getting a little squidgy around the edges, but it still runs like a top, it’s comfortable as hell, and it holds us, our family, our dogs, and all the crap we regularly haul in it, from groceries to electronics to furniture to gardening supplies to lumber.  Plus, Mynagirl LOVES the seat heaters and EngineerBoy LOVES the cold AC!

Emerilware 12″ Frying Pan:  We bought this frying pan as an add-on to the 10-piece set, which we also love, but we use the frying pan 4-7 times a week and it’s fantastic.  Solid design, nice heavy bottom with a copper disk, easy clean up, and cooks eggs without sticking (even though it’s not non-stick)!  The entire Emerilware line seems like a bargain, with the performance of the esoteric, high-end stuff, but a much lower price than All-Clad (which is who produces the Emerilware line).  And the stainless steel cleans up like a dream with Bar Keeper’s Friend and a scrubbie.

Deco Breeze Fans:  Our little cottage doesn’t have central air-conditioning, so we depend on window unit AC to get us through the hellish Texas summers.  One key to effective cooling is the use of fans to circulate the air through the house, but most fans are ugly and even the best-looking ones are mostly utilitarian in design, and certainly don’t complement one’s decor.  However, Deco Breeze makes interesting-looking fans in a variety of designs, and the two we have both work and look great.

DeWalt Cordless Drill:  If you do ANY kind of home repairs or construction, get one of these.  Seriously, don’t even think twice, go get a DeWalt’s cordless drill and you’ll NEVER regret it.  They are tough, reliable, well-designed, and just seem to last forever.  We have two of them (his and hers) so that we don’t have to share.  The cheaper ones don’t compare, and nobody makes one better.  Still don’t have one?  What are you waiting for?!?  Go!  NOW!!!!  Sheesh.

TiVo:  Our TiVo is kind of like our DeWalt – even though it’s not cheap, we never question the expense.  TiVo will change your relationship with television, in a good, positive way.  First of all, although it may not seem possible, TiVo frees you from your television.  Actually, it frees you from program schedules.  We don’t really know when the shows we watch come on, exactly.  We track the day that certain shows are on (e.g. House is on Tuesday), but mostly our TiVo spends its day quietly and reliably recording the shows that we might want to watch, so that if and when we get a few minutes to veg out, there’s (almost) always something on that we want to see.  Our TiVo’s also let us move shows from room to room to watch wherever we happen to be, and we can also copy “keepers” off the TiVo and onto one of our home servers (we’re computer geeks) to watch/rewatch/burn to DVD as we see fit.

Books:  Is every book we purchase a winner?  No, but every dollar we spend on books is well worth it.  There is always the chance for a clunker, but that risk pales in comparison with the ability of books to impart information, expand imagination, enlighten, explain, and entertain.

Doggie Dooley:  We have three dogs, each bigger than the next, and a relatively small back yard, so we started to get a problem with flies, which are attracted to…well…dog poop.  We feed our pups high-quality food, so they have a low poop-per-puppy-pound ratio, but the three of them still manage to mine the yard pretty thoroughly.  However, the Doggie Dooley has allowed us to develop a routine of going out back with them each day and moving all the poop-bombs to a contained area, where enzymes and bacteria break them down and leach them out like a septic system.  The Dooley comes with a primitive poop-rake, but we prefer this one.  We still get the occasional fly, but our backyard is usable again.

WordPress Blog Software:  That’s the software running this site right now.  It’s flexible, fun, fast, functional, and FREE.  There’s an entire subculture of people who develop and extend the WordPress environment, virtually all of it available at no charge.

Indoor/Outdoor Thermometer + Atomic Clock:  If you don’t have one you might think that they’re just for weather geeks, but they are infinitely useful.  We have three of them (bathroom, living room table, kitchen) and we find we refer to them multiple times a day.  It’s nice when getting ready in the morning to see the temp outside and also know the exact time.  Yes, one could flip over to the Weather channel or look it up on the web, but once you get used to getting accurate outside temp and time with just a glance you can’t go back to not knowing the accurate time and temp.

Tori Richards Cotton Lawn Shirts:  Tori Richards makes Hawaiian-esque shirts, and I particularly like the ones made of cotton lawn fabric.  It’s thin and breathable, but the shirts can go from the washer to the dryer to the hanger to the shoulders without any special care (no ironing, no dry cleaning, etc), they wear like iron, they hang like silk, and they look fantastic (if I do say so myself).

FARK.com:  FARK.com is a strange website that aggregates not-news stories, and endlessly mocks and derides…well…just about everyone and everything.  The specific focus of this paragraph, though, is Total Fark, which is the $5/month membership site, which provides access to even more distracting derangement.

Amazon Prime:  You may have noticed that a lot of the product links in this article go to Amazon.com.  FYI, I’m not a shill for Amazon in any way, however, as a former big-city-dweller who now lives in a small town I can tell you that our lifeline to good products is Amazon.  We buy a LOT of stuff from them, and to facilitate our consumerism we belong to Amazon Prime, for which you pay a yearly fee, but then all your Amazon purchases are shipped 2nd day air at no extra charge, and overnight shipping is a flat $3.99 per item, regardless of size and weight.  Amazon Prime is limited to items shipped and sold directly by Amazon, so partner products aren’t eligible.  For us out here in the sticks, with only a super Wal-Mart, it is a wonderful lifeline to wonderfully wide selection of actual quality products.

Godaddy.com:  Simply put, we use Godaddy for all our domain registration and hosting needs.  They aren’t perfect, but they provide a terrific value for the dollar and give us a one-stop-shop for all our domain/hosting needs.

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Riveter? Check. Cure cancer? Check. Housewife? Check.

Human history has seen very few widespread, dramatic changes the likes of which occured with the Industrial Revolution.  The most profound social effect of this is arguably the female influx into the labor force (precipitated, in the United States at least, by the two World Wars), and follow-on women’s liberation movement. Prior to the 1900s, most abrupt changes to the human situation involved physical disaster or nasty, fast-moving microbes.  Thus having minimized much of the destructive natural-world forces via a “perfect storm” of industrialization, sanitation, automation, and mobilization, America could move up a rung on the Maslow Hierarchy and focus on productivity, fulfillment, and equality.  And America’s women could start stepping up and carving out more options from society than housewife, mother, maid, or prostitute.

A child of the 70’s and 80’s, I grew up with Women’s Lib safely tucked in near-recent history and girls being able to grow up to be just about anything they darn near pleased, at least as far as I remember. Not that gender roles didn’t exist — they surely did, especially in Texas. Boys play football; girls are cheerleaders. I had lots of friends whose moms were homemakers. My mom, bless her soul, wouldn’t let me own a Barbie or watch MTV because of the “unrealistic image” both projected of women. 

Probably my sharpest stinging personal memory of gender-role-infliction came in my High School Algebra II class when I was 14 (by this time I lived in Kentucky).   The demon of last-name-alphabetization and higher-math-class-demographics had me not only as the only sophomore but also one of very few girls.  I tended to constantly raise my hand in class — an annoying trait to be sure that will never win you the love of your high school peers, but it beat sitting there bored out of my skull when the teacher continually asked for an answer to a problem and then stared, painfully, into the classroom horizon’s sea of slack-jawed apathy.  So I was a nerd and proffered the right answer a lot in my math class.   After a particularly whiz-bang class period with lots of such participation, the jock-dickhead-popular-boy behind me asked witheringly, “Why do you even bother being smart?  You are just going to be somebody’s housewife someday.” 

Shocking as the statement was, as deserving of a “fuck you” as ever a comment deserved, I sat there mute.  Navigating high school on a daily basis is taxing enough without having to defend your gender and whether or not you’re allowed to use the brains you happen to be born with.  My defense blessedly came from another boy in class — sweet, friendly, not-very-good-at-math Jimmy Flanagan, looking as Irish as his name implies — who asserted I’d probably end up curing cancer.  So in 1988 in Kentucky, I at least had the option of curing cancer or being a housewife.

Once out of Kentucky and out of high school, career-gender-limitations really did drop away — or at least you were supposed to act as though there truly were no differences or barriers.  The politically correct 90s had definitely drummed out any explicit institutional barriers to females advancing in previously testosteronic fields.  But for every academically brilliant girl I knew that was pursuing an advanced chemistry degree, there was one who didn’t know how to put gas in her car because “if she just stood there looking cute some man would come help her do it”.  Actually, that was the same girl (true story).  So while the institutions weren’t allowed to treat us differently, we XX’s were allowed to act differently when and if it suited us.

The 90s progressed and I checked off the boxes for “middle class white kid” on my scoresheet, finishing college and getting an entry-level job at a huge insurance company.  I soon discovered I liked programming and got to be part of the tech boom in the 90s, hopping and salary-skipping up to a crappy consulting firm, then a big consulting firm.  By the time the tech boom had withered, I’d still found a niche as a money-making independent mercenary contractor. 

In this decade/century/millenium, I have settled nicely into working for a hosting firm where Engineerboy also works.  I love my job — it’s challenging, tiring, and frazzling as hell but for some reason I can’t envision doing anything else with my professional life that doesn’t involve an unexpected windfall inheritance.  Over the past couple years we’ve shifted to working from home 99.9% of the time, and even moved out into a small town about 90 minutes’ drive from the office.  It’s a sweet situation when you can choose the right spot to live and you don’t have to worry too much about where your “office” is. 

So my daily life now stands in sharp contrast to much of middle-class working America.  I spend 22+ hours a day at home.  I interact with my husband throughout the workday as well as in the evenings.  Our conversations are an interwoven mix of shared work chatter, house & home chit-chat, and any other random topic (news/politics/celebrities) that occurs during the day.  When our meeting schedules align to give us a mutual break midday, we share lunches as well — either a trip out to a local restaurant or a couple homemade sandwiches and maybe a half-hour break in the living room to watch South Park.

Over the years sharing this wonderful shared insular life working from home, I have realized that this is actually how the human unit is supposed to function.  The Industrial Revolution which brought us the amazing advances in sanitation and mobility and economics also enacted profound changes on the family, and maybe not for the better.  Although I’m certainly not waxing romantic about an epoch prior to the flush toilet, it does occur to me that back in the day when a family man’s options were farmer or merchant of his family-run store in a smallish town, his family probably spent more time together than they do now.  That what we think of as “normal” now — where we spend 9+ hours a day away from the ones we love and provide for — maybe isn’t really that normal given the course of human history.

I can’t tell you the number of people who have looked at me askance when I say that my husband and I work for the same company and thus spend most of our time together.  Many remark outright that they themselves couldn’t possibly do that.  Which I find odd — I mean, if you liked your spouse enough to marry her, shouldn’t you be willing to be around her most of the time?  Personally, I think that working with my spouse, at a common endeavor, sharing the same space, feels absolutely like what humans have evolved to do and how we should function if at all possible.

I’m glad the Industrial Age’s wheel has turned a full revolution and landed back where families have the ability to be home-based once again.  And although my job may not be curing cancer, at least I can have a challenging, fullfilling career, and be a housewife.  If you have the chance to do the same, I highly recommend it.

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"Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave." -- Henry Peter Broughan

There are many problems that our new president will face on day one of his administration.  The economy.  War in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Terrorism.  Energy policy.  Global climate change.  Etc.  And I, as an American voter, should expect that important issues will be addressed quickly, with the most urgent issues being tackled first.  When I project to the first 100 days of the new president and speculate as to what will be his first, major policy undertaking – the one that will set to tone for his administration – I realize that there is one over-arching, all-important issue that serves as the foundation of solving all other issues.

Education.

Education is the only lever we can use to pry ourselves out of our current morass of apathy, stupidity, ineptitude, tomfoolery, flim-flam, and bullshit.  An educated voting public is the one and only way to preserve and refresh our still-great-but-stumbling nation.

Education is the only pathway to break us out of the fool’s game of dogma, partisanship, and illusion.  Skepticism and critical thinking are the only tools that a voter can use to make truly informed choices.  Intellectual curiosity leads one to question each and every candidate on each and every claim and issue, to make truly informed decisions, and to eschew the hegemony of the Idiocracy.

But how do we get to the point where a discerning population of voters makes informed votes to give us effective leadership?

Education.

Well, how do we fix education?  There are so many problems in our public educational systems that it’s like handing a lumberjack and ax and telling him to chop down the forest.  Where to start?  How about by announcing that the federal government will immediately match existing public school teachers’ salaries, effectively doubling their income?  Make teaching a competitive career for truly sharp, motivated people.  Back in the day I would have loved to teach, but not enough to sacrifice a lifetime of more than double the salary doing something else that I also love.  And even if I had gone into teaching way back when, I’m sure I’d be out of it now that it has devolved into being minimum security prison guards getting ground down between apathetic parents, idealogical wars, dingbat board members, and impotent administrators.

But if we double teacher salaries, suddenly the best and the brightest might actually consider teaching our children.  Suddenly the existing tiny core of truly effective, talented, and motivated educators would grow by leaps and bounds to include people across the spectrum of industries and avocations, and break the stranglehold that the mediocre have on the teaching profession in America today.

Seriously, when is the last time you met a truly exceptional public school teacher?  Not exceptional when compared to other teachers, but exceptional when compared across the board with other professionals in all industries and career paths.  Personally, I can count them on one hand.  Now, how many public school teachers have you met that were unexceptional drones, and the only way you could stop the keening in your head was because they seemed, at the very least, harmless?  I don’t have enough fingers, toes, and/or other appendages to even make a dent in that count.  And that situation is the exact reverse of what we need – a mediocre teacher should be the exception, and the harmful teacher should be immediately rooted out and dismissed.

The bottom line is that if we want to return the United States to a position of leadership in the world, and we want to ensure our continued economic prosperity, and if we want to reclaim the moral high ground and become the “good guys” again, we need to start with the education of our children. 

Is doubling teachers’ salaries the only step?  No, it is only the first step, but it is one that needs to be taken.

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President Powell. Has a ring to it, no?

We just watched Colin Powell on Meet the Press with Tom Brokaw, and I just have to ask, why isn’t he one of our choices for President?  He is the kind of person that we need in the job, but I don’t think our system can deliver him up, because he’s not a power-hungry, megalomaniacal clown.  He’s a smart, wise, thoughtful public servant, and he’s just what we need in the White House.  Someone with experience and respect on both sides of the aisle, and around the world.

I might waste my vote on a write-in for him.

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